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At present I am trying to login to my Webmasters Stack Exchange account.

My normal mailserver (which forwards to my webmail) was, unbeknownst to me, offline for most of yesterday, so my repeated attempts to request a Forgot Password? email, eventually resulted in the display of the following message:

Too many recovery requests; please try again later.

I notice, with dismay, that my request for a Forgot Password? email is met with the same response this morning:

Too many recovery requests; please try again later.

So I am locked out of my Webmasters Stack Exchange account for I don't know how long.

But I am already logged in to Stack Overflow. Is there a security reason why I can't use my live, logged-in credentials on Stack Overflow to log in to my Webmasters Stack Exchange account (in the same way I can switch backwards and forwards between Stack Overflow and Meta?)

And...

P.S. How on earth do I get back into my Webmasters Stack Exchange account?

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    There are two stages: logging into your Stack Exchange ID, and Stack Overflow (or Pro Webmasters) accepting the OpenId athentication. You are locked out of stage 1. Stage 2 succeeded at some point in the past for Stack Overflow but is still cached. It could time out or, if you switched browsers or cleared cookies, lost. At that point you'd be locked out of Stack Overflow too. – Martijn Pieters Oct 19 '17 at 9:55
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    Pro Webmasters won't accept the Stack Overflow cached credentials, and I don't think it should. The browser won't let you share the cookie from SO to PWM, and I don't think any of the SE sites should just blindly accept cached credentials from other sites if the source-of-truth, the OpenID server, won't authenticate you. That would open a security hole, as you could then log in to any SE site with cached credentials from another, bypassing any timeouts. – Martijn Pieters Oct 19 '17 at 9:57
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    The timeout is for 24 hours, so you should be able to recover your password tomorrow. – Oded Oct 19 '17 at 10:50
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    We're good - thank you both for all your help. After reading @Martijn's comment, I went back to stackexchange.com, requested a new password (successfully), logged into StackExchange (successfully) and then (having logged into StackExchange successfully) logged into Pro Webmasters successfully. – Rounin Oct 19 '17 at 10:57
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    @Rounin: welcome back! – Martijn Pieters Oct 19 '17 at 11:01
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    I'd suggest for the sake of UX, @Oded's observation that "The timeout is for 24 hours" ought really to be incorporated into the user alert: Too many recovery requests; please try again after 24hrs. – Rounin Oct 19 '17 at 11:03
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    Point taken - it did cross my mind when looking through the codebase. – Oded Oct 19 '17 at 11:04

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